Season of Discovery Developer Update - May 17

Greetings,

The team has been hard at work on Season of Discovery and Cataclysm Classic. There’s a lot happening in Classic right now, and while we’ve been working incredibly hard, we’ve also been fairly quiet, so we felt it would be a good time to provide an update on a few things, including Season of Discovery Phase 4.

Phase 4 Release Update

Cutting straight to it, and as you have no doubt likely noticed, the World of Warcraft team has been delivering a lot of exciting content lately, and this will (of course) continue well through the next few months and beyond. As such, to land Phase 4 at just the right time, our current phase (Phase 3) is going to last longer than previous Season of Discovery content phases. We can’t share Phase 4’s release date just yet, and we know this news and the longer Phase 3 may be disappointing to some, but our timeline will ensure that our Classic team delivers an experience worthy of our players at the high-quality bar we are setting for ourselves.

We’re so very excited to share what’s next with you.

We also want to make sure that we take the time we need to deliver equally awesome experiences in both Season of Discovery and Cataclysm Classic, and give Cataclysm Classic’s launch the time it deserves to breathe, without players feeling the pressure of needing to choose between it and all of the other fun things that are happening in WoW right now. We understand our players love to plan, so we wanted to signal our intentions now and let you know that we intend to share the exact timing of Phase 4’s launch, and start discussing what it will include, as early as it is possible to do so.

Please stay tuned for more information on Phase 4 coming soon.

Phase 4 PTR Plans

In a departure from previous phases, we will spin up a limited PTR specifically focused on combat and class testing for Phase 4. We plan to include level 60 templates with all runes and abilities learned, and we tentatively plan to provide some sort of access to level 60 tier set bonuses. We also plan to provide access to training dummies and some raid content, as well as battlegrounds, so that players can test out their new builds. Again, our intent with this PTR is to focus on combat and class testing, and we will not be using it to test the unique content coming with Phase 4. We’ve received an enormous amount of class feedback from players, and we’re very excited for the level 60 runes to be discovered as well as our revamped tier sets.

We’re investing heavily into class adjustments going into Phase 4, and while perfect balance is not the goal, we do want to look at classes, specs, and runes that are underperforming and find opportunities to make as many improvements as we can. Many classes will see substantial redesigns going into the level 60 endgame, with some runes moving around and others becoming baseline skills. We’re excited for players to jump in to play around with these substantial adjustments and participate in the feedback loop with us ahead of Phase 4 hitting live realms.

We’ll share more information on our testing schedule very soon.

Level 60 Content Phases

One common question we’ve been asked is “how will the various raid tiers roll out at level 60?”, and we want to provide some clarity and let everyone know that we will be rolling raids out in phases similar to how we did in 2019’s Classic. The first tier will consist of Molten Core and Onyxia, and a few weeks after that we will see Blackwing Lair, followed by Zul’Gurub, with additional endgame content and surprises that we’re planning to add between the major raid tier releases as well. For ease of communication, we intend to frame our releases around the familiar original WoW raid tiers.

Sunken Temple Adjustments Incoming

One consistent piece of feedback we’ve received is that the rewards from Sunken Temple have been a bit underwhelming. During our design and testing of Phase 3, we didn’t entirely know the scale and scope of adjustments we’d make to Level 60 dungeon gear, Tier 1 item sets, and Molten Core and Onyxia gear. Now that we have a good idea about those, we think it makes sense to increase the power level of some of the Sunken Temple gear. These updates will particularly focus on caster gear, which feels the most underpowered.

We’ll let you know when we’ve got this ready to implement in the live game.

We want to again express a heartfelt thanks to our passionate players. We’ve had a blast playing with you in Season of Discovery and now in the Cataclysm Classic pre-patch, and we can’t wait to get more exciting Classic content into your hands very soon!

Thank you,

The WoW Classic Development Team